ATTLE MASTERS 
EMIL WALDMANN 


M. KNOEDLER & CO. 
14 EAST 57TH STREET 
NEW YORK 
2927. 


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BARTHEL BEHAM 
Madonna at a Window 


Height 4 


¥%,, width 33% inches 


THE LITTLE MASTERS 


BY EMIL WALDMANN 


M. KNOEDLER & CO. 
I4 EAST 57TH STREET 
NEW YORK 


1927 


The text of this Booklet is translated from 
CHAPTER iv 0f Diz NÜRNBERGER KLEIN- 
MEISTER VON EMIL WALDMANN (Meister 
der Graphik, Band V. Verlag von Kunkhardt 
& Biermann). 

It has been printed for presentation only 
and is not for sale. 


THE LITTLE MASTERS 


BY EMIL WALDMANN 


HE collective name “Little Masters” was coined 
2 this small group of artists, because they have 
usually adopted a very small format in their graphic 
productions. They all have, it is true, worked along 
other lines, they have painted panel pictures and ex- 
ecuted portraits, they have been miniaturists, painted 
frescoes on walls and made designs for stained glass. 
Yet their importance, culturally and for the history 
of art, resides essentially in their graphic accom- 
plishments, in their small—sometimes, quite minute 
—engraved prints. These quickly found their way 
throughout Germany, Italy and France. They were 
sold at fairs, considered as individual pictures, they 
were pasted into books and collected by art lovers. 
These artists, then, were masters in the small for- 
mat; moreover they were masters of the minute sub- 
ject, intimate masters. . . . They proceed from Al- 


brecht Dürer. He had made the graphic arts quite 
5 


free and had shown by his example what a wealth 
of subjects for pictorial presentment was still lying 
quite fallow. He had shown how a thousand differ- 
ent things might be expressed with the graver and 
with the woodcutter’s knife, things quite barred 
from presentment by means of painting. 

With Diirer these are side-issues, these little tales 
told, these things put down as they were seen, side- 
issues from his large cycles and from work under- 
taken for the emperor. The Little Masters have 
grasped the themes here touched upon, they have 
elaborated them and made them fruitful. They have 
borne these new topics unto the people, and because 
they have conceived and treated these subjects in 
popular vein, they have made them popular. We can 
hardly conceive, today, what was the effect of these 
activities, since every subject is familiar to us in art. 
But how astonished must the burghers of all classes 
have been, in Nuremberg, when all of a sudden the 
most commonplace and natural things assumed pic- 
torial importance. The most insignificant matters, 


things to which hardly anybody had hitherto given 
6 ; 


HEINRICH ALDEGREVER 


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width 25% inches 


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HEINRICH ALDEGREVER 
Susannah at the Bath 
Height 434, width 3% inches 


a thought, were now pictured again and again. Be- 
fore that time these things had appeared in Nether- 
landish calendars, as marginal designs, as explana- 
tions of constellations of the various months. There 
one could see the countryman’s life during the 
changing seasons, tilling the soil, and the toilsome 
existence of the peasants, those despised children of 
Saturn, doomed to misfortune, was pictured at 
length, in all its particulars. But such pictures were 
scarce luxuries, intended for the few great and 
wealthy on earth. Even the better bred among the 
people had had no share in them. Now, however, 
these pictures of life had become accessible to every- 
body, and this in a form of their own, as an end. 
The fourth estate, which was here depicted, could 
buy these little prints for a few pennies and behold 
themselves as in a mirror. This was bound to give, 
at one stroke, an undreamt-of popularity to the lin- 
ear art, the more so, since the naturalism in the con- 
ception did not content itself with these topics from 
daily life, but also sought to pervade all the other 
spheres. Not only is a peasant woman pictured faith- 


9 


fully here, as she is hurrying to market with her 
basket, not only are a few leaders of mercenaries 
portrayed, as one has frequently beheld them ın ac- 
tual life—no, every other subject likewise, Biblical 
stories and the Gospels are embroidered with genre- 
like features. Lot, the brother of Abraham, sits with 
his daughters as a spendthrift sits at wine with loose 
women, and in the Marriage at Cana, where a St. 
Martin’s goose graces the feast, a parrot looks down 
from his perch. The holy Apostles have become poor, 
wandering folk, and in the story of the Prodigal Son, 
one has no longer the feeling of something very sad 
and calamitous, indeed everywhere there is a sense 
of the comfortable and homelike. That degraded 
man, standing there among his pigs, desirous, so the 
inscription states, of feeding on husks, really looks 
like a peaceable herdsman at eventide, and in the 
picture of the reconciliation, the plowing peasant 
and the man slaughtering the calf always again 
draw one’s attention. This particular way of look- 
ing upon the Holy Writ, so entirely from the view- 
point of a simple human being, and for the benefit 


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HANS SEBALD BEHAM 
Young Woman and a Jester (Etching) 
Of the same size as the original etching 


Zuge ER APIS SIREN, 


of grown-up children fond of seeing things, could 
not but find quick appreciation at a time which 
moved in rationalistic cycles of thought, and with 
people in large cities, who took much pleasure in 
the external appearance of things. Add to this that 
the pictures of daily life and of the street were quite 
up-to-date then. Was it not the first time that the 
peasants, those “felt-hats,”” those ‘‘flails,’* were 
playing a political röle, and were being watched 
with curiosity, when, straight from the concerns of 
war, they came to market, their hayforks on their 
shoulder. 

Wide circles were, indeed, in sympathy with their 
endeavors, and may have taken no less interest in 
them, as pictured, than in the fantastically togged- 
up mercenaries with their martial appearance, who 
were again loudly disporting themselves in the city. 
Here were fascinating contrasts, these “fine” sol- 
diers, and the wretched, but for that reason no less 
dangerous, peasant-warriors, who were forbidden to 
wear the garb of the lansquenet. At times the artists 


* Equivalents of: ‘‘Hayseed’’ and ‘‘Rube.”’ 


13 


have sought to enhance the timeliness of their prints 
still further by means of explanatory or “speaking” 
inscriptions: “Der Krieg ist aus—Wo nun himans.” 
(War is over—Now what next.) is found upon the 
picture of the suddenly jobless lansquenets, and Se- 
bald Beham has added to his figures of the drum- 
mer Acker Concz and the color bearer Klos Wuczer, 
two decades later, the explanatory remark “Im 
Bauern Krieg 1525” (In the Peasant War 1525). 

The ancient tales with their quiet, comfortable 
tone, offered a good opportunity for chatty story- 
telling. The fairy-tale nature of many imaginings, 
and the broadly elaborating treatment gave an in- 
centive to imaginative recreation. 

Judith, for instance, was Hecuba to the people, 
and could be unrestrictedly dressed up as a lady of 
fashion; garbed in the costliest gowns, fur-trimmed, 
hung with the heaviest of golden beads, in order to 
satisfy the craving for luxury, perhaps even for pro- 
hibited luxury. Certain themes, also were presented 
in a new light. Pencz has engraved a series of hero- 
ines of the Old Testament, and has illustrated by 


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HANS SEBALD BEHAM 
Standard Bearer and Drummer 
“In the Peasant War. 1525.”’ 
Of the same size as the original engraving 


GEORG PENCZ 


Death of Virginia 
Height 4%, width 2156 inches 


many instances, how woman is the doom of man, 
how woman’s guile and falseness has depraved the 
noblest among men. Undoubtedly this was most in- 
teresting at a time when much discussion was going 
on about woman’s röle, and when many of them 
were competing with men and had a share in politi- 
cal and social life. 

Yet these stories from the Old Testament did not 
form the most important theme about which the 
Little Masters could inform the people. This was 
more or less familiar ground to them, and what they 
most craved was novelty. Those who could not read 
were hungry for intellectual food, that food of which 
they had heard so much talk: the fairy-tale of an- 
tiquity. And so the engravings of the Little Masters 
became an educational agency in the broadest sense; 
the figures of antiquity arose to new life. The Rape 
of Helen, the wars of Greeks and Trojans, were 
related upon friezes as long as a finger, and Queen 
Dido stabbed herself, while on one side — with 
learned statements of sources of information — the 
event was briefly related. Here one heard about the 


+7 


twelve deeds of Hercules, one saw Nessus, as a Satyr 
(!), decoy the beautiful woman-nymph Dejanira. 
Fabulous figures are playing the lyre, hidden in the 
reeds, and a female Satyr answers on the bagpipe, 
and Tritons, astride of Dolphins, battle with one an- 
other, The Judgment of Paris is presented, now he- 
roically in calm nudity, and again somewhat trivi- 
ally, part-dressed and chatty. The gods of Olympus 
appear as planetary figures, some favored few of 
them, such as Venus, accompanied by the blind- 
folded Cupid, appear by themselves. In one instance 
she makes an eloquent inviting gesture with her 
hand, whose significance is explained, on a tablet, 
by the words: “‘Audaces Venus Jbsa Juvat.” The Tri- 
umph of Bacchus resembles the Triumph of a Ro- 
man General, men and women, bearing trophies, 
precede him, while excited satyrs form the cortege. 

Besides mythology, history engages the minds, 
notably—as is natural with the status of tradition 
then obtaining—first and foremost Roman history. 
Marcus Curtius, Mucius Scevola, Virginius and 
Porsenna are the heroes, the Horatii and Curatii ac- 


18 


BETEN 7 


ALBRECHT ALTDORFER 
Horatius Cocles leaping into the Tiber 
Of the same size as the original engraving 


HANS SEBALD BEHAM 
Cimon and his Daughter 
Of the same size as the original engraving 


complish their deeds, one hears about Cimon and 
Pero and about Lucretia stabbing herself. For the 
murdress Judith, in the Old Testament, an inter- 
esting parallel is found in Queen Tomiris of the 
Scythians. 

Allegories are also tried, presentments in the sense 
of the humanists. The Christian and antique virtues 
appear as female figures with their attributes, the 
liberal arts likewise, and also the vices are shown 
allegorically. 

In mythology Nessus was a centaur. Hans Sebald 
Beham knew that, for in the series of the Deeds of 
Hercules he has pictured him as such. In another 
print, however (P. 110), he renders him not as a 
man with the body of a horse, but as a Satyr with 
cloven feet and cow horns. The artist was not main- 
ly concerned with the diffusion of exact knowledge, 
his main endeavor may well have been a present- 
ment of the antique realm of fables, a charming lit- 
tle genre picture, an amorous couple doing just about 
what the “Peasant and his sweetheart” also do close 


by the fence. He may have added the mythological 


21 


names merely to secure more interest for the print, 
since whoever may have had no interest in loving 
couples had some in mythology, and vice-versa. The 
artist was not so very keen to have everything accu- 
rate; what interested him mainly was an artistic 
theme: the nude human body. And this is, most 
likely, one of the main reasons why the Little Mas- 
ters turned, in steadily increasing measure, to an- 
tique subjects. Here they could make use of the 
nude. That was surely something quite novel, then, 
something quite important. The generation preced- 
ing Dürer hardly knew the nude, or knew it only in 
a wholly different sense. St. Sebastian and St. Jerome 
were almost the only themes, aside from the Cruci- 
fied Christ, in which nude bodies were to be seen. 
Hence antiquity, with its throng of gods and demi- 
gods was also quite a new world, from a formally 
artistic standpoint. The force which Dürer had 
brought with him from Italy, the Renaissance, the 
new grand style of presentment, strove with might 
and main toward the light and was the actually 
modern. Let Tom, Dick and Harry delight in their 


22 


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HANS SEBALD BEHAM 
Death and a Nude Woman 
Of the same size as the original engraving 


HANS SEBALD BEHAM 
Leda and the Swan 
Of the same size as the original engraving 


familiarity with the family relations of the gods, in 
their knowledge that Daphne had been turned into 
a laurel tree, and that Nessus was not a satyr but a 
centaur—the artists wanted to know how a human 
body is built up, how the masses are correlated to 
one another, how one achieves motion and what are 
the facts about balance and counterpoise. Once they 
had learned this and had mastered the nude body, 
once they had grasped the essential points of propor- 
tion, the secret of which was possessed in Italy, they 
wanted to show this nude body, and show it again 
and again, because, forsooth, it was beautiful. Beau- 
tiful in a way quite undreamt of before: in its unfet- 
tered, wholesome, healthy humanness. Often the hu- 
man body became, for the artist, the main theme of 
the picture. A nude was scantily qualified by some 
accessories for a Flora or a Cleopatra. And the many 
fascinating figures of children, which we meet with 
in the prints by the Little Masters, owe their exist- 
ence not only to a newly awakened sense of the ways 
of the child and its quaint humor; they are likewise 
important as nude subjects. Before Barthel Beham 


=> 


turned to humanistic subjects, before he created those 
magnificent friezes of Gladiators, with their parade 
of nudes in the guise of fighting men, he had made 
the nude child-body the subject of his studies. In the 
children’s Bacchanalia with the Vat, by Master I. B., 
we find Italian bambini of almost grown-up forms 
and with virile gestures. 

The attitude in which the Little Masters have ap- 
proached all their fields of subjects, was, as we have 
seen, almost always purely genre-like. This manner 
has been elaborated by them and may be considered 
as being quite essentially their domain. This is the 
point, also, in which they have gone beyond their 
great teacher Durer. They are the first masters of 
genre in German history of art. But aside from this, 
there is another field which they have cultivated and 
handled originally, namely ornament. Their actual 
importance for the culture of their time is almost as 
great here as in that other sphere, which has just 
been considered. If in their little pictures of daily 
life, in their feeling manner of relating the stories 


of the Holy Writ and of spreading afar the tales of 
26 


ALBRECHT ALTDORFER 


The Virgin in a Landscape 
Height 67As, width 45% inches 


LUDWIG KRUG 


St. John on the Island of Patmos 
Height 57, width 37% inches 


antiquity, they exercised a direct influence on the 
mental life of their contemporaries, in ornamental 
prints they found a means to collaborate in the ex- 
ternal culture of their period, in imparting a certain 
shape, or at least a certain manner of decoration, to 
the implements of daily life. The ornamental prints 
which issued from their hands served as direct mod- 
els for the craftsmen, as had the ornamental prints 
of the XVth century before them, the productions of 
Schongauer and of Israhel van Meckenem; and they 
must have been used in large numbers, more espe- 
cially by the goldsmiths, i.e., by the most distin- 
guished craft, which brought forth so rich a harvest 
in that very Nuremberg. It is not surprising that the 
major portion of the early, of the Gothic, ornamen- 
tal prints presents patterns for gold and silver ware. 
Was not the technique of engraving closely linked, 
originally, with the handicraft of tooling and grav- 
ing metals, and it is to this fact that the ornamental 
engravings of the XVIth century owe, not in least 
measure, the sureness and adequacy of their essen- 
tial style. Only one striking feature remains, namely 


29 


that these artists have given so little thought to the 
invention of new forms and objects, but have main- 
ly concerned themselves with the elaboration of or- 
nament only. The great popularity of this form may 
perhaps be explained by its being so neutral. Once 
the Renaissance proportions were accepted as a prin- 
ciple of general structure in applied art as a whole, 
the panel could be used almost anywhere. On gob- 
lets with an articulation of lateral bands (as yet for- 
eign to the Gothic taste) just as well as on furniture 
treated architecturally, on mantels, chests and cab- 
inets; on keys and drinking cups just as well as on 
arms and on the embossed borders of Rhenish stone- 
ware. The interior decorators could make ceiling 
friezes with them just as readily as the stonecutters 
could use them for panels on cornices, doorways and 
windows. Oftentimes the artist has contrived his or- 
namental design for alternations thus providing for 
variations without end. Much more rarely do we 
find ornament, as destined to some specific kind of 
use; in fact this is practically found only in the orna- 
ments for dagger sheaths, since here, owing to the 


30 


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ALBRECHT ALTDORFER 


Mucius Scevola 
Of the same size as the original engraving 


asymmetric shape of these objects a symmetrical use 
and halving could not be contrived. 

If one considers how close the Little Masters stand 
to actual life, in all their achievements, how they 
produce with an eye to sales, how they figure on re- 
turns, how they allow themselves to be guided by 
public taste in the choice of their subjects, one would 
think that they would also have devoted a brisk ac- 
tivity to portraiture. Here, surely, was quite a new 
source of income. As a matter of fact, there are not 
very many portraits by the hands of these artists. 
Barthel Beham, who was in Bavarian employ as a 
portraitist in the thirties of the XVIth century, has 
engraved a half-dozen portraits, some of them repro- 
ductions of his paintings. By the hand of Pencz, 
who has likewise painted many likenesses, we know 
a double portrait of a couple—probably the portraits 
of the artist and of his wife—as well as a portrait of 
a prince. Master I. B. has published the rather medi- 
ocre portraits of Luther and of Melanchthon. That 
is all. Hans Sebald Beham, the most business-like 
of them, has never ventured in that field. The rea- 


33 


son for this lies, perhaps, in the insight of these art- 
ists, that they lacked the abilities requisite for a 
burgher portrait. Dürer had shown, in his Melanch- 
thon and in his Pirkheimer, how such problems 
should be solved. He has shown it in a masterly and 
sovereign manner. Possibly the burghers of Nurem- 
berg knew their Melanchthon, such as we see him in 
the small engraving by Master I. B., better from a 
glimpse of him in the street, than the man with the 
profound eyes under mighty brows as pictured by 
Dürer. Yet a shy instinct may have told these artists 
themselves which was the more important. Psychol- 
ogy was not their forte anyway; they had had as few 
dealings as possible with the human soul. 

Only one further word, in this place, as to their 
technique. It goes without saying that herein Diirer 
was again the main prototype. None before him had 
handled the graver as he did, with such a supple 
freedom, and at the same time with such patient 
truth and great severity. If we compare him, in this 
particular, with the Italians of his time, with Mar- 
cantonio, Agostino Veneziano and Marco Dente da 


>4 


BARTHEL BEHAM 
Charles V. Emperor 
Height 83As, width 5°%6 inches 


DIRICK VELLERT 


Christ and the Woman of Samaria 
Height 434, width 3Vis inches 


Ravenna, it becomes clear at once, what there is ın 
this technical superiority of German engraving. The 
Little Masters, with all their affinity—otherwise— 
for Southern ways, have taken good care not to bar- 
ter what they had learned from Dürer for the line 
engraving of the Italians. Their great art in the ob- 
servation of detail, their far-reaching realism in the 
rendering of all substances, their wealth in the gra- 
dation of media has usually held its own victorious- 
ly against the ideal abstractions of the Italians. The 
mirroring gleam of the metal in the Arms by Durer, 
the greatest possible illusory effect of grass and flow- 
ers, of the wooden panelling of a room, of hair and 
fur—all this ever was the ideal of the Little Masters 
in this heyday. They have kept to that, indeed they 
have sometimes even tried to excel it. The natural- 
ism of conception in all subjective matters called for 
a far-reaching naturalism in the characterization of 
visible texture. The public for whom they worked 
were hardly content with suggestions, they de- 
manded robust certainty and unquestioned clear- 
ness regarding all that was laid before their eyes. 


37 


Whether a dress was made of velvet or of satin in- 
terested them very much, and to those who found 
pleasure in minute execution, such a print as Barthel 
Beham’s Madonna with the Parrot must have meant 
an actual delight. Given such a sentiment, these art- 
ists have acquired a tremendously solid, highly ex- 
act, manual skill. The one least clever among them 
is Georg Pencz, who most nearly approximates the 
manner of engraving of the Italians. Hans Sebald 
Beham, on the other hand, is the first and certainly 
one of the greatest virtuosi of engraving. As with 
Dürer, so with him, the language of pure, supple, 
swelling and tapering line is very expressive. He 
superposes three, four layers of lines one upon the 
other for the purpose of plastic modelling, and even 
though in many cases the variations in states of his 
plates are due not to artistic but to commercial rea- 
sons (his endeavor to keep the plates fit for print- 
ing as long as possible, hence the reworkings, by 
his own hands, when wear became apparent) it can- 
not be denied that he made use of these means in a 
masterly way. A very considerable mastery of the 


38 


HANS SEBALD BEHAM 
Madonna with the Parrot 
Of the same size as the original engraving 


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ALBRECHT ALTDORFER 
St. Jerome in a Grotto (Woodcut 
Height 65%, width 434 inches 


medium is requisite in so reworking plates of that 
nature, that they will yield any good impressions at 
all. His modelling of figures, especially of nudes, de- 
serves, indeed, our greatest admiration. There are 
not many engravers who can vie with him in that 
evenness of graphic effect and black-and-white tonal- 
ity. With most artists who go to such levels of plas- 
tic rendering, we miss the equipoise in the balance 
of the pictorial expanse. Even where Hans Sebald 
Beham engraves ever so delicately and minutely, 
using abundant stippling in his modelling, he still 
almost invariably controls the general effect. Even 
in the last decade of his activity, despite the slacken- 
ing of his artistic powers and of his earnestness, this 
selfacquired faculty never fails him. 

As regards technique Hans Sebald Beham was 
the leader of the group. At first Barthel proceeds for 
a brief space together with his brother, but he soon 
turns to a more coloristic, to a warmer manner of 
engraving. That depth of modelling, and that high- 
est plastic form, with bright light, in which Sebald 


succeeds later on, Barthel has never attempted; he 


41 


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HANS BROSAMER 
Christ on the Cross between Martin Luther 
and Frederick the Wise (Woodcut) 
Height 454, width 6 inches 


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HANS BROSAMER 
Christ on the Cross 
Height 103%, width 634 inches 


generally prefers an effect of clair-obscure and really 
never quite abandons the deep black of the back- 
ground. Indeed with increasing maturity, when he 
turns more and more to subjects of humanistic cul- 
ture, the light on dark even predominates with him. 
The friezes of the Battles of Men appear more Ital- 
ian in this external particular, than the works of Se- 
bald, with whom the Rape of Helen surely would 
exhibit quite another aspect, had he conceived it 
himself and not copied it after Barthel Beham. 

The works by the Master I. B., finally, are quite 
close, in character, to those by Barthel Beham, as re- 
gards technique. For a time he has then adopted a 
very dashing, not very vigorous stroke, a flowing, 
playful manner, used occasionally by Sebald Beham. 

Of all the group, Sebald Beham alone has made 
etchings, but he has not, for all that, found an actual 
etching style. The true medium of expression of the 
Little Masters was, and remains, the graver. 


44 


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